Thumbnail photo via screenshot

Beloved character actor David Huddleston, who played the title role in The Big Lebowski, passed away Tuesday of heart and kidney disease, the LA Times reports. He was 85 years old.

Though probably best known for playing the Dude's wheelchair-bound nemesis in the Coen brothers' famous film, Huddleston's half-a-century-long acting career was long and varied.

He got his start on TV during the 1960s in shows like Bonzanza, and continued acting steadily in film, television, and on stage for the next 50 years. Huddleston was a familiar face on The West Wing, gave a rousing speech as a lawyer in Blazing Saddles, and popped up in the 2005 film version of The Producers.

Huddleston is survived by his wife of 32 years, Sarah Koeppe, who told the Times, "Things were not important to him—people were."

Read: 'The Big Lebowski' Saved This Guy's Life

Speedrunners play games fast. They beat 70-hour games in three or four minutes, exploit glitches to create shortcuts, and skip content that you or I might call "critical" in the name of efficiency. It takes a lot of work to play games this quickly. Despite how easy they make it look at events like Summer Games Done Quick, the art of optimizing play demands countless hours of study, and only the most dedicated students rise to the elite class.

Among these select few, though, there exists a small cadre of experts whose vital role is all too often overlooked: the routers. The routers are the people behind the curtain, uncovering the tricks that turn 70-hour RPGs into 30-minute glitch-fests. The routers are the ones doing the math to determine the fastest route through the Water Temple. The routers are the ones who realize that a trap meant to kill the player holds the hidden key to beating the game in just minutes.

"Routing is basically the puzzle game of speedrunning." - Chunkatuff

It takes a keen eye to be a good router. You have to spot the tiniest quirks in a game's design and consider how they might be turned against it, breaking it in ways the designers never thought of. "It's very important to be observant," as 'chunkatuff,' the router responsible for finding many exploits in Escape Goat 2 and Ori and the Blind Forest, told VICE. "Never overlook anything that's pertinent to the situation."

This attitude served Chunk particularly well in Escape Goat 2. In the puzzle-platforming game, falling blocks are supposed to squish enemies, but Chunk noticed that they would "bump" enemies sideways if dropped at the right angle. Using this insight, he was able to push enemies to specific parts of a level instead of waiting for them to walk there on their own, cutting crucial seconds off the previous world-record time.

Chunk added that there was nothing particularly spectacular to this trick. "I just took into account all of the possibilities and added them together like a puzzle," he said. "Routing is basically the puzzle game of speedrunning, and you don't always know what all of the pieces are when you start."

Perseverance was a common thread among the routers I spoke with. Indeed, finding the shortest path through a game requires spending longer with it than even the most die-hard fan. "It is a lot of science and experimentation and almost drudgery to test ideas and try to find big exploits," explained Nick 'maglevtrain,' a router with experience crafting Tool-Assisted Speedruns, or those played by a computer instead of a human.

This sentiment was echoed by Lucas 'PerilousPeanut,' router of Ed, Edd, and Eddy: The Mis-Edventures and Reimagine: The Game, among others. "For Reimagine, a lot of the skips and optimizations were very gradual," he told me. "It definitely took a long while for it to get to the level of optimization it is at now."

"Most routes of the game don't make it off the drawing board." - Adam "VB"

Sometimes, of course, all that effort is for naught. Dead ends are an occupational hazard, and it's just as easy for a new trick to end up hurting a run as helping it. PerilousPeanut recalled one such failed strategy in Ed, Edd, and Eddy. He discovered a way to glitch into a later part of a level and collect a crucial item earlier than intended, but the trick was incredibly tough to pull off, and failing it meant death for both the runner and the run. In his words, "It would theoretically maybe be faster with perfect execution, but it's such a massive detour that is so incredibly risky it's not even worth it."

Even when a trick looks good on paper, it doesn't always pan out in practice. "Sometimes the best route won't be faster most of the time," explained Jeffrey (a.k.a. "I have no name"), the router responsible for much of the original routing work on Ape Escape. Adam "VB," a Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow runner who also routed Mega Man V, agreed. "Most routes of the game don't make it off the drawing board," he said. "Some I've routed aren't even realistic for a real-time speedrun because of their difficulty."

A lot of the routing process comes down to trial and error, but in some cases, the game itself can provide guidance on how best to break it. Buried within data files and hidden behind secret commands, the building blocks of a game can expose cracks in its façade. Fittingly enough, the cyber-styled Tron: Evolution conceals just such clues in its code, as router Eric "Jamacanbacn" discovered. By digging around in the game's configuration files, he discovered that it was built on the Unreal engine, which meant it supported special developer commands that expose a game's guts from within the game itself.

Using these commands, Jamacanbaco located invisible walls and platforms that allowed him to skip entire fight scenes.

Speedrunner Jamacanbacn shows off a speedrunning trick he found in 'Tron Evolution'

The routers I spoke with often emphasized the importance of collaboration within the speedrunning community. When people discover a new trick, they share it with their fellow runners and routers, growing the pool of collective knowledge and spurring one another on to ever-faster times. For a community founded on competition, the sense of camaraderie is almost heart-warming.

"I obviously wouldn't be able to do these without the accumulated knowledge the community has gotten throughout the years," VB said. "One of my favorite Aria of Sorrow memories was working on a very difficult All Bosses route with Hetfield90. We stayed up until late at night working on the nuances of this route. It gave me a real feeling of community."

At the same time, the act of routing itself is a predominantly solo affair. When you're in the thick of it, hunting down exploits and calculating the cost of changing an existing route, communicating to a partner all the relevant information swirling around inside your head can be more trouble than it's worth.

"Collaborative routing is hard," Jeffery explained. "The main obstacle is making sure everyone involved has the same ideas and current route, and that can add a lot of time to the routing process. Because of this, I tend to route alone."

Chunk elaborated on some of the trade-offs involved in synchronous routing. "Collaborating with others is often only useful to the point that you're all on the same page," he said. "You'll be working on a puzzle, and you have all of the pieces known right now, but then someone will try to work on it with you, and you'll have to show them all of the tricks and glitches and such, and even just what order things load into the map sometimes."

Pouring hours on hours into dissecting and optimizing a game changes a router's perspective irrevocably. Going back and playing the way most of us do is no longer possible. "If you're trying to go through casually, you just can't ignore that you know what to do at any given moment," Chunk said. "You either intentionally make a mistake, or you make a mistake that you would have made during a speedrun too."

This mindset isn't isolated to the games they've routed, either. The drive to constantly be seeking out shortcuts and exploits bleeds over into recreational gaming, making it hard to stick to the path the developers intended.

"The mindset is always there," Jeffery admitted. "Even when first playing a game, I'm always looking for ways to cut corners and save a couple seconds here or there. Sometimes it works, and I spend less time backtracking; other times I die horribly and have to do the section again. Either way, it's a permanent part of my playstyle now."

The router life isn't the most glorious one, though. The endless trial and error, the hours wasted on dead-end tricks, the same pixels and polygons burned into your retinas like a plasma TV afterimage—and at the end of it all, someone else's name is sitting next to the world record. But like the supports in a class-based shooter, routers are vital to a team's success. They might not top the leaderboard at the end of a match, but without them, there might be no race at all.

Follow Matt Sayer on Twitter.

An innocent sandal-clad bystander watches as an important lesson unfolds before his eyes, briefly considering if this is his moment to become a hero. Screenshot via YouTube

Unless you live in some Scandinavian infrastructural utopia, dealing with public transit can be maddeningly frustrating even at the best of times. It's enough to make one consider many unmentionable actions, or, at the very least, venting your anger at the nearest bus driver. But on Wednesday at approximately 4:30 PM, one Winnipeg man found out why this is a very bad idea—and like all great amateur public fight videos, it was captured in all its glory vertically in a cell phone video.

Most of the time, sex is fun. But every now and then, things don't go as planned, even if you're you're championship basketball legend Dennis Rodman. In this clip from the most recent episode of our new VICELAND show Party Legends, Rodman fills us in on the three (yeah, three) separate occasions when he broke his penis during sex. Let this be a lesson to everyone.

Check out the clip above and make sure catch new episodes of Party Legends every Thursday at 10:30 PM on VICELAND.

Check out Coralie's website.

Mink Stole as Mink and Divine as Lady Divine. Photo by Lawrence Irvine

John Waters—queer film visionary, perennial prankster, and Baltimore's bohemian of bad taste—released Pink Flamingos in 1972. At the time, it was perhaps the most outrageous movie ever seen at the American box office. (After all, it includes a scene where Divine, Harris Glen Milstead's proto-punk drag-queen character who appears in many of Waters's early movies, literally eats dog shit.)

But for Waters, Pink Flamingo was a toning down of the odious aesthetic for which he'd eventually become infamous, a sensibility he brought into being with his lesser-known 1970 predecessor, Multiple Maniacs. The long-out-of-print "celluloid atrocity" has been restored by the Criterion Collection and debuts at New York's IFC Theater today.

Multiple Maniacs, like all of Waters's films, takes place in his hometown of Baltimore. It follows Divine alongside Waters's cast of so-called Dreamlanders, including Mary Vivian Pearce, David Lochary, Mink Stole, Cookie Mueller, and Edith Massey, as they take their traveling fetish circus, "The Cavalcade of Perversion," on the road. Eventually, they decide they've grown bored of all conventionality and turn to robbing and murdering their audiences—and each other—instead.

The film is chock full of Waters's signature dark comedy: Members of Divine's troupe eat puke and take drugs, Divine has lesbian sex in a Catholic church using a rosary as a dildo, and Divine is, at one point, raped by a 15-foot-tall lobster. Near the film's end, in a Godzilla-like scene, Divine stalks a sidewalk, terrorizing everyone in sight, before being gunned down by a firing squad to the tune of "America the Beautiful."

VICE spoke with Waters to discuss his film career, Lady Divine's legacy, and to ask, after nearly five decades as a moviemaker, what's next.

Divine as Lady Divine on the set of Multiple Maniacs. Photo by Lawrence Irvine

VICE: What inspired Multiple Maniacs?
John Waters: I was trying to figure out what was still legal to show on screen, as far as censorship went. So it was many things—exploitation and underground films, the Catholic Church, the movie Freaks, Pasolini. I just wanted to make a startling movie, which I think it actually still is.

How long did it take you to make the film?
I was on LSD, I can't remember! This was the first movie I made with dialogue, where my characters could speak, and we would shoot it when we had money. I wrote it as we went along. I think it took eight or nine days.

" didn't want to be a woman—he wanted to be a monster." —John Waters

How does the film reflect the social and political realities of life in the late 1960s and early 70s?
Well, it was made at the height of the hippie years, but certainly it's a punk movie, even though nobody knew what punk was then. The hippies that liked it then turned into punks. I think it was a parody of what would be considered politically correct today. I wasn't much of a hippie, but I was a yippie—yippies were political. And, in a way, the film was a political act. It was an outlet for our anti-social humor.

Is the rosary scene a reflection of your early life in the Catholic Church?
The rosary scene is something that even I had never done. But I rebelled against the church—the first thing I ever rebelled against, my mother told me, was when they asked us to take the Legion of Decency pledge, to pledge that we wouldn't see sinful movies condemned by the church. I refused, and I was eight years old.

Filth is a theme that runs throughout Multiple Maniacs and, later, Pink Flamingos.
Well, first the word was "camp," which was so corny to me. To me, camp is two older queens talking about Rita Hayworth under a Tiffany's lampshade. Then the word became "trash," but I had already done trash with Mondo Trasho, so, to me, that word was used up. But "filth" had a nice punch to it. It sounded a little criminal, a little dangerous. People were already calling me trash, and I needed to go further. In Multiple Maniacs, David Lochary was trash, Divine was filth, and together, they reached a new level of comic hideousness.

Divine was punk before punk. She has this 1950s stay-at-home-mom aesthetic, but her hairstyle and makeup are very punk. In what ways did your relationship with Divine's legacy change over the past fifty years?
Well, as you know, Milstead died in 1988. Today, he's more respected than ever. Luckily enough, he died right after Hairspray opened, and he got all those great reviews.

He didn't want to be a woman—he wanted to be a monster. After he died, he got great reviews for the early movies. I'm still shocked he is dead, really. I bought a plot in the same graveyard, so did Mink and all my friends. We're all going to be buried together. We call it "Disgrace Land." I think that his influence is still very much felt. I'm proud of that for him, because he was such a good actor.

The theatrical poster for Multiple Maniacs

Drag mirrored Divine in the years following those films.
I completely agree. Every drag queen on RuPaul's show has been influenced by Divine. They're all hip now. When I was young, drag queens were not hip. They all just wanted to be their mothers. I framed Divine right in front of Warhol's Liz, and Divine's hairdo in Multiple Maniacs is definitely styled after a demented Liz Taylor.

You also use Baltimore as one of your muses. What is it about Baltimore that inspires your films?
It's the only city on the East Coast that's cheap enough to be a bohemian in. Baltimore always had a great mixture of people. It was rich kids, poor kids, black kids, white kids, gay kids, and everybody hung around together. To me, that was the big influence—the world of bohemia.

You've held careers as an artist and comedian, on top of filmmaking. What's next for you?
Oh, I've had loads of careers. I like them all the same. They're just different ways to tell stories.

And lots! I'm working on two books. I'm booked for the next few years. I'm fine. I got a job—just none of them are movies right now.

Multiple Maniacs opens today, Friday, August 5, in New York City at the IFC Center. Director John Waters will be present for a Q&A after the 7:20 PM show.

Follow Antwaun Sargent on Twitter.

Thomas Nast's drawing of draft rioters in Printing House Square. Image courtesy of Hachette Book Group

New York City has a reputation of being a liberal place, but the history of New York is much more convoluted and conservative than most textbooks would have you believe. John Strausbaugh, the author of the new book City of Sedition: The History of New York City During the Civil War, writes that New York was perhaps the most pro-slavery city in the North and fought hard to prevent the Civil War from happening.

NYC also benefitted greatly from slavery: It's the same things that make New York the rich and attractive place today that made it a partner in slavery leading up to the war, namely its ties to finance and commodities trading. New York was enriched by slavery, and then enriched again by the war effort.

Strausbaugh has made a living writing detailed histories of New York (his last book was a 400-year history of New York's Greenwich Village), and City of Sedition is no different in its expansive coverage of the city during the Civil War. It documents the surge of immigrants before the war, the fights between local politicians in the city and abolitionists in Washington, and the role of finance in both hindering the war effort and supporting it once it got underway. It's a history of the Civil War told through the lives of its constituents—newspapermen, politicians, activists, immigrants. But it's also a profile of a rambunctious, complicated, and counterintuitive city—a profile that still feels applicable to New York today. VICE spoke with the author this week to get his take on why this history of New York has been mostly forgotten.

An artist's rendition of New York City and Brooklyn in the 1850s, looking north.

VICE: For starters, when you think of New York City, you never really think of the Civil War. You think of Washington, DC, Abraham Lincoln, and the South. As you write in your book, New York was such a huge part of the war effort, so why do you think it's never really talked about?
John Strausbaugh: New York's giant impact on American affairs was no secret at the time. But over the years, the stories about the Civil War have gotten simplified, as they always do as time passes. The story of New York's involvement is messy and confusing and contested, so that's part of the reason it got left out. I think another big reason is that Civil War history is only taught and only spoken about as military history now. We know in minute detail what happened at the battle at Chancellorsville, but we talk less about the larger issues and how the war happened, and that's where New York plays a big role. The nearest battle to New York was Gettysburg, which was 200 miles away, so it doesn't get spoken about in those kinds of stories.

If New York wasn't a place of battle, how did it affect the Civil War?
New York was arguably the most pro-South, pro-slavery city in the North because it had a very long and deep involvement in the international cotton trade. Cotton blew up in the first half of the 1800s. It went from under a million pounds being exported from the United States around 1800 to more than two billion pounds by 1860. A lot of that was due to New York City's involvement.

New York City banks funded the plantations that spread all across the deep South. New York merchants supplied them everything from their pianos, to their plowshares, to the clothing that they gave their slaves to wear. New York shipped out a significant portion of the cotton that went up to New England and over to England to be milled. Those ships, when they came back bringing other goods back with them, brought them all into New York, where everybody came to buy them. So New York had this very long relationship with slavery and the South, and everybody from the bankers and the businessmen, to the dock workers and waiters in the hotel restaurants had something to do with the plantation industry and depended on it as much as any plantation owner did.

So New Yorkers were against abolition?
In the decades leading up to the war, New Yorkers were very much against the abolitionists. The majority of New Yorkers were very hostile to Lincoln when he was coming up, and remained opposed to him at every step during the war. But at the same time, New York also had some very key abolitionists, like Horace Greeley, for instance, the editor of the New York Tribune. They tended to be guys from New England who came down to New York, so you have a sort of North-South war going on in New York City that mirrored in its way the war going on in the rest of the country. If it wasn't for Greeley and a small group of very visible, very vocal abolitionists in New York City bringing Lincoln to come speak to the Cooper Union in February of 1860, it's highly unlikely he would have made it into the White House.

New York seems to still play a similar role, in terms of dictating the economy of other states through its finance capital.
Yes, except it's role in the US was even bigger . It was the banking center, the media center, the capitol of capital, the shipping center. It was the center of everything, and it was a giant metropolis by 1850s and 1860s standards. If you count Brooklyn, which at the time was a separate city, but a sister city, there were about 1,250,000 people here. That was twice as many people as in Philadelphia, which was the next biggest city. It also had a big political influence because it had all those people in it, and New York state had more electoral votes than any other state in the Union by a large margin. It had a huge impact on everything, and we tend to forget that now because the economy and banking and media and everything has been more spread out and dispersed over the last 30, 40 years. There is no central hub anymore, but it certainly was then.

All images courtesy of CipSoft

In the online MMO Tibia, there's a door with a simple message: "You see a gate of expertise for level 999. Only the worthy may pass." This week, a player named Kharsek passed through that door. It took him nine years to build up enough experience to hit level 999. But once he passed through the door, Kharsek disappeared, and took the secrets with him.

This mysterious door has been one of Tibia's more reclusive secrets since it was added into the game in 2005. For a long time, the developers told me, there was nothing behind the door. It was a joke shared with the community, an amusing "what if?" meant to remain unsolved.

"The main motivation clearly was to tease players because the creators honestly did not think that anyone would actually reach that level," said Tibia lead project manager Martin Eglseder.

Then, one person did.

This is the door that people have been wondering about for a decade.

Tibia, one of the oldest MMOs on the internet, launched in 1997. Nearly 20 years later, people are still actively playing it. As of this writing, there are 12,701 people playing Tibia. It's never been a game for the timid; Tibia is a hardcore online RPG, one that regularly kicks players in the teeth. When you die, the game docks a percentage of experience from your character, potentially rolling back real-world days worth of progress. That edge is what keeps people coming back.

"The combination of the extremely harsh death penalty and the hardcore leveling curve is what makes the game fun," said Mathias Bynens, the owner of TibiaMaps, a blog chronicling the ongoing changes made to the world of Tibia. "It makes gaining another level feel like an accomplishment and successfully escaping from a dangerous situation feel like a relief."

Tibia started as a hobbyist project by four German computer-science students. The game's unexpected success prompted them to form CipSoft. The game's almost two decades old, but CipSoft told me the game still commands roughly 500,000 active players from 200 countries.

"That Kharsek reached level 999 is impressive. That he did it in a little under nine years is outright incredible." -Mathias Bynens

"As one player once put it, 'Tibian friendships last a lifetime,'" said Eglseder. "This is one of the main reasons people stay in the game or come back to it after some time of 'retirement.' Many players have accompanied Tibia throughout the years and so the game has become a part of their lives. They are Tibians."

Tibians are often obsessed with knowing everything about the game. A true secret is hard to find. That's what makes the locked door so alluring: For once, everybody is truly in the dark.

There is no level cap in Tibia. If players truly wanted to, they could level forever. But the reason a door demanding a player reach level 999 was so daunting is because leveling up in Tibia, especially as you reach into the hundreds, is a draining and time-consuming task. That didn't stop Kharsek, who first joined the game in 2007. He's the first player to reach level 999.

"That Kharsek reached level 999 is impressive," said Bynens. "That he did it in a little under nine years is outright incredible."

The developers agreed, telling me nine years is "considered quite fast by many Tibians."

Kharsek is a reclusive player, one who's become more hermit-like since his accomplishment began attracting wider attention. "All I know is that he's a Brazilian player who keeps to himself," said Bynens, "which is perfectly understandable seeing as he's probably getting spammed in-game 24/7 by fans, especially now, with all the hype going on." I didn't have any luck trying to get in touch with him myself.

So what does it actually take to reach level 999 and open the mysterious door? Well, let's put it in perspective. Going from level 19 to level 20 requires 15,400 experience points, and the most you can get from a single enemy is a high-level boss that drops 35,000 XP. For level 49 to level 50, it's 112,900 XP. At level 50, you've acquired a grand total of 1,847,300 XP. At level 100, it's a massive 15,694,800 XP.

Moving from level 998 to level 999, though? It requires the equivalent number of points as leaping from level 1 to level 145: 49,650,700. According to a website tracking Tibia player data, there are only four players above level 900. The closest player to Kharsek is 60 levels behind.

Even with a team of people helping him with buffing, healing, and other tactics, Bynens estimates Kharsek was earning roughly 5 million XP per hour. At that pace, it would take roughly nine hours of constant grinding simply to move from level 998 to level 999.

And he's not the only one who's been keeping tabs on Kharsek. His level progression has been closely monitored and celebrated, as the milestones stacked, with videos shared on YouTube.

Eight months ago, Kharsek was only on level 930. Three months ago, he was on level 968. And remember, any time that Kharsek was killed would send him spiraling back down in levels, taking him further away from his goal.

The level 999 door has vexed Tibia players for years, but it drew wider awareness when a Reddit post predicted Kharsek would soon reach level 999, drawing interest to a fever pitch.

"I've never heard of this game in my life," said one commenter, "and the most important thing I have right now is this stupid bastard opening that stupid door."

The developers have been preparing for this moment, long before Kharsek hit level 999.

"I've never heard of this game in my life, and the most important thing I have right now is this stupid bastard opening that stupid door." -Reddit comment

"A secret that has existed and been nourished by players for so many years cannot be lifted without disappointment," said Eglseder. "You cannot fulfill all the different hopes and expectations that players have attached to it. No matter what you do, you cannot satisfy everybody."

In terms of deciding what would actually be beyond the door, they went with something they feel is "best for the game as a whole and in the long run."

In today's streaming culture, it wouldn't have been a surprise if Kharsek made a big deal about walking through the door. He could have built up the spectacle and drawn attention to himself. But that's not what happened. Instead, earlier this week, Kharsek did what no other player in Tibia has done before and quietly walked through the door that demanded a player be level 999.

... And that was it. The outside world hasn't heard from Kharsek since. It's been radio silence.

"Maybe there are chests with rewards inside there," reads a forum post by a player that watched as Kharsek walked through the level 999 door. "Maybe there are NPCs there... Maybe levers and hidden stuff... We don't know... Kharsek got out... and logged off."

As of today, no one knows what's behind the door. The developers are keeping quiet, too.

"No, we won't spoil what's behind ."

The most Eglseder would say, perhaps to calm players worried they're missing something amazing, is "there's not a whole feature set or package of 'end game' content behind it."

Or is there?

It seems possible that Kharsek was upset about the way Tibia players have been treating him. On his quest to level 999, people would track him down and screw with his leveling progress.

"A group of people liked to consistently invade the spawns Kharsek was hunting in and kill as many creatures as possible, just to lower his exp/hour rate," said Bynens. "Other times they'd lure hordes of strong creatures on Kharsek's healers, forcing them to run away or die, causing Kharsek to be left without a healer, which is dangerous even at his level. Bullying at its worst. I don't know what Kharsek did to deserve this. Maybe people just got jealous at his high level?"

And now, there's another reason to be jealous: Kharsek is the only one who knows what's behind that door.

Follow Patrick Klepek on Twitter, and if you have a news tip you'd like to share, drop him an email.

We've all watched enough prison dramas to imagine what it's like to be in jail – eight-by-eight cells with damp concrete walls; a single camp bed with a stained sheet; a square barred window and a cold, metal toilet in the corner. The thing we also learn from all of this TV is that when you're in jail, your motivation for getting through every day is the thought of getting out. But what if it's not all celebratory on the outside?

In the week that ended on the 29th of July, 40 offenders were released from prisons in the UK, and while the majority will remain on probation, they are once again free to live their lives. But with license restrictions and the psychological repercussions of having spent time inside, what's it actually like to leave jail? We asked former inmates about what they wish they'd been told about getting out.

Name: Ramon
Age: 48
Location: Sheffield

Coming out of prison is never easy, whether you've been inside for two years or 22. I'd done 11 years inside when I was released in 2013 after serving half my sentence.

When I went inside I was using a Nokia 3310 – smartphones and the internet weren't really on my radar. I thought an email address was called an email number. A whole decade went past in which technology came on leaps and bounds. I came out to a whole new world.

On top of getting to grips with the world being a completely different place, there's all these restrictions that come with getting out. You don't just serve your time and then it's over – it's never really over. I'm not allowed to leave the country, I've got to meet my probation officer for 10 years and I'm not allowed to earn more than £250 a week. Well, I can, but if I do I have to give it all back as part of the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA).

POCA is basically when the judge thinks that you've been making money from illegal activities, whether they're sure or not. They'll say, "We believe that for the last six years you've spent and earned this amount of money buying and selling drugs, so that equates to however many millions, and you owe it to us." For me, that number is just over £6 million.

Luckily I actually have a job, thanks to some good friends, which is more than can be said for a lot of offenders. People think that the biggest struggle leaving prison is the psychological one, but it's the financial struggle that's a killer. It's not being able to earn over £250 a week, no matter how hard you work. It's knowing that without your family you wouldn't even be able to support yourself.

Name: Brendy
Age: 24
Location: Belfast

I'd just turned 18 when I got caught up in the riots in Ardoyne in Belfast in 2011. A month later, I was identified on CCTV by the police and charged with throwing a petrol bomb at a police officer and riotous assembly.

My mum had recently died unexpectedly aged 40 and it had a massive impact on the way I was thinking. At the time, I was smoking weed heavily. Despite my clean record, I was sentenced to five years – two in prison and three on supervised licence. When I got remanded in custody I didn't know what to expect, but prison itself wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.

Inside, I was told false promises about what the authorities would do for me when I got out, but the reality is that I was handed £68 and sent on my way. No help with employment, no help with housing and no help with drug counselling; despite the judge ordering that I complete a drug rehabilitation programme upon my release. I've been out for 24 months now and there's still no sign of that programme ever happening. I asked my probation officer about it and they just said that it was down to lack of funding.

I had to get myself housed. I had to get myself into employment and I had to get myself off the dope, which I'd been smoking heavily for 12 years, with no assistance from the authorities.

I now understand why people with no family links end up back inside again, because at the end of the day it's the offenders that keep the prison staff in a job. If I didn't have strong family links and an amazing girlfriend there's no doubt in my mind I would have reoffended.

Name: Rich
Age: 40
Location: Leicester

I never wanted to live in Leicester, and left my parents' house when I was 17. After a few years working as a valet in LA I made a permanent home for myself in Marbella – I was in Spain until I was getting locked up. I could go for years without seeing my family, but was deported from Spain, where I served an eight year sentence for drug-related crimes, and placed under house arrest for two years. It came as a bit of a shock to be 35, back in a confined space, living with my 75-year-old mother.

I think a lot of people see house arrest as some sort of easy sentence, but it's debilitating. I was in solitary 22 hours a day, so coming out and having to talk to people who I'd spent my whole life happily escaping was challenging. Knowing that you're that close to freedom is torture.

Another thing no one tells you is that you'll be so excited to eat real food that you'll put on the five stone you lost from malnutrition inside. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose.

I've been out for three years now, but I know that I've basically recreated my whole prison routine at home. It's a security thing

NAME: SANDY
AGE: 37
LOCATION: NOTTINGHAM

When you're released from prison they always promise that you'll get town and home visits before you leave to get yourself used to it, but I didn't get any of that. My partner picked me up and took me home, and then there was nothing. No support. No guidance. I'd been inside for 15 years and then it was over.

We came straight back home, but I hadn't been there for a decade. It was almost like I had to acclimatise myself to it, so I became a bit of a clean freak. I went into every nook and cranny to try and get to know my environment. In your cell, you know every square inch, so being in such a big space was intimidating.

Now I have to have my own room in the house, and it has to be freezing cold – it was minus two in winter; so cold the bed felt wet. It's just what I'm used to. My partner said; "You've made your room into a cell," and I suppose I have.

I've been out for three years now, but I know that I've basically recreated my whole prison routine at home. I get up and go to bed at the same time, I do a similar job to what I did on the inside. It's a security thing. It's about finding a way of being comfortable in this world, and that means bringing in some aspects of my prison life. Being confined to space and routine is what makes me feel good now.

WATCH: Institutionalised – Mental Health Behind Bars

Name: Cameron
Age: 22
Location: Belfast

When I was 19 I got in a drunken argument on a night out. One punch and the guy just fell and smashed his head on the ground; I didn't know whether he was dead or alive, and I felt so guilty that I handed myself in. I found out that he ended up in intensive care for three weeks with brain injuries, and required 24-hour care after that. I was sentenced to two years in prison, and although it was a really scary experience, it was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

If I didn't go in there, I would've ended up dead. I was addicted to drugs – meth, coke, ecstasy, MDMA, cannabis. From my experience, I just don't have the same kind of access to those drugs, so I had to detox and get myself clean – and prison is as good a place as any to do that.

When I went inside I didn't have maths or English qualifications, and now I've got both. I've also got a job at the Thinking Cup Café, which employs ex-offenders. They don't care about your past – they see you for who you are now and what you can be in your future. I went in with nothing and I came out with something.

@sophiebrownHP

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Former Inmates Tell Us About the Weirdest Things They Saw in Prison

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Protesters set fire to an Olympic flag during a demonstration in Rio de Janeiro. All Photos by Phil Clarke Hill

As night fell in Rio de Janeiro, a group of protesters in the public square of Praça Afonso Pena grew restless. Some began burning a Brazilian flag, then a Rio 2016 volunteer's shirt. Another splinter group gathered into a huddle. One member lit a fake Olympic torch on fire and took off into oncoming traffic.

The line of military police that had blocked the crowd from continuing onto Maracanã Stadium, where the 2016 Olympics Opening Ceremony would be held later that night, quickly broke rank in response. Suited in body armor and protective masks and clutching night sticks, some cops ran after the torchbearer, while others shot canisters of tear gas and a percussion grenade into the square, causing families there to seek shelter from the ensuing chaos.

A protester holding a fake burning torch stands in front of police in riot gear.

The evening's tumultuous finale capped off what had been—until then—a relatively contained rally through the streets of Rio, as hundreds gathered to protest what have derisively been labeled the "Jogos da Exclusão," or "The Exclusion Games." They represented perhaps the loudest of the two-thirds of Brazilians who told pollsters hosting the Olympics would actually hurt their economically threatened country, and the roughly 51 percent who had "no interest" in the quadrennial sporting event.

To many residents, the Games embody everything that is going wrong in Brazil.

"None of the things that were promised to us happened," Renata Monteiro, an 18-year-old student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, told VICE. "Instead, we got luxury beaches and a golf course. And no one in Rio plays golf."

A protester waves a black flag behind a line of police officers.

A few hours after the protest in Copacabana, Monteiro joined more Brazilians who gathered in the Praça Saens Peña, a meeting point before the roughly two-mile walk to Maracanã. Banners displayed there read "FORA TEMER"—the rallying cry for Brazilians who want Michel Temer, the unpopular interim president, out of office—and "The Torch Kills," criticizing the police violence that seems to be a part of everyday life in Brazil. A number of protestors wore shirts supporting Vila Autodromo, a favela that, for many critics, is now Exhibit A of the pre-Olympic displacement that changed the urban landscape in Rio."There are so many problems here that you could ask all of the reporters in the US to come and there still wouldn't be enough visibility," Monteiro said. "At least with the Olympics here now, people are watching."

"We are here today to denounce all of the violence committed as a result of the Games," said Glaucia Marinho, 31, a member of Justiça Global, a human rights NGO based in Rio. "And we're protesting the 60,000 people removed from their homes by force."

A protester performing a parody of the opening ceremony of the Olympics.

Off to the side, a group of performers dressed as Greek Olympians were conducting an ironic awards ceremony—togas, golden crowns, makeshift torch, samba, and all. There was even a banner rallying against the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. The woman behind that banner was Misako Ichimura, a Japanese organizer who traveled to Rio to learn from the anti-Olympics protest movement here and build momentum in her home country. "It's usually very similar in each Olympic city," she told VICE. "You have the eviction of poor populations, just for rich development."

As the protester and police presence in the square multiplied, the crowds soon flooded onto the streets. Amidst anti-Temer and anti-Olympics signs, two fringe protesters held up posters that morbidly praised the Dallas and Baton Rouge police shooters. Chants harkening back to Brazil's military dictatorship broke out: "It did not end! But it must end! I want the end of the military police!" Cops lined the sides of the crowd, with a row of policemen on horseback in front. But for the most part, they simply stood guard.

"During the World Cup, they surrounded us in a square and wouldn't let us leave," Thalia de Oliveira, another student, told VICE."I remember one of the policemen broke a journalist's camera. It was more violent, because it was more packed. We're not sure what will happen tonight."

That uncertainty dissipated an hour later, when a smaller youth faction began running through the crowd, burning flags and exploding aerosol cans. Wearing black balaclavas, they then raided a corner eatery, turning over tables and chairs before police intervened, and two protesters were dragged off. Yet despite the disturbance, the walk continued.

The sun was setting by the time the crowd reached the end of their route, at Praça Afonso Pena, where children gathered at the jungle gym and older Brazilians played cards. The red-and-white tear gas dispersed what was left of the demonstration; afterward, Red Cross volunteers huddled over one woman, who protesters said was recovering from a severe asthma attack due to the gas.

Less than two hours later, fireworks could be heard from the Opening Ceremony. The Games had officially begun.

Follow Angela Almeida and John Surico on Twitter.

Thanks, guys. Illustration by Adam Waito

On paper, the concept of an outdoor music festival seems like Xanadu. Floating freely through a field with friends while dozens of your favourite bands play a series of stages sounds like an ideal way for any music fan to spend the day. Thing is, the dream gets shattered once you get through the gates and realize you've basically been corralled into a Dante's Inferno of human misery, and you actually paid to get yourself inside. Standing under a beating sun for 12 hours isn't all it's cracked up to be, the food cart racket is built to bleed you dry, and there's nothing more annoying that having to navigate yourself from the front of the stage to a rancid port-o-john a half-mile away through a gauntlet of half-passed out zombies in flower crowns.

You'd think playing on-stage would come with a few perks, but it generally doesn't get much better if you're a performer—a fact that apparently took Twisted Sister's crew by surprise at Amnesia Rockfest in Montebello, QC earlier this summer. With the busy summer festival season across Canada in full swing, VICE spoke to a handful of event veterans about the stage hazards, backstage beefs, and brutally annoying audiences that come with festival life.

Louise Burns, Twin River/Blue Violets

I've played a lot of festivals overseas. My most favourite memory that was kind of a nightmare, but more a crazy hilarious, random experience, was playing a festival called the Inter City Music Festival in Inner Mongolia. This was sometime in August, and we were driving there from Beijing. The drive was supposed to take five hours or so, we get on the highway and we're in this giant van. Soon, we realize it's been, like, seven or eight hours. Lots of time has gone by, and we're in a traffic jam. It takes us probably nine hours to get to the actual festival site. We later found out that we were in one of the biggest traffic jams in history, it was called the China National Highway 110 traffic jam. It began on August 14, 2010 and lasted quite some time. We ended up getting stuck in a little part of history, but we show up and it's literally in the most beautiful field I've ever seen.

We were scheduled to play with a lot of Chinese bands that we didn't know. Everything was going smoothly in the daytime, but it started to rain so hard that the stage itself was at risk of blowing up, because there was no cover over top of the equipment. I had to have a really frank conversation, because I was tour managing the Blue Violets at the time. Myself and the tour manager for the Killing Joke had to sit down and say, "Do we do this? Do we put everyone's lives at risk when the stage is not covered and it's raining, and there are electrical wires everywhere?"

They covered the stage in the end, and it was all OK, but it pushed back the time by five hours. We played to a crowd of thirty people at two in the morning.

Small stage hell. Photo via Flickr user Michael Coghlan

Chris Slorach, METZ

I would say the biggest nightmare for any festival is the lack of washrooms behind your stage. I know this sounds stupid, but you want to go pee before you go onstage so you don't have to go in the middle of your set. Sometimes you have to walk three miles to get to an area where you can actually go to the bathroom! It's been a problem.

Recently, we were in Germany for a festival where there wasn't really a backstage area to speak of. Behind the stage was this field, and it's open to the public. There's no specific area for us to warm up in... you couldn't just find a tree. We all basically ended up peeing in the middle of a bunch of people the whole day. I'm sure everybody snuck a peek. There was no chance we could be hidden. It was this big pool of urine behind the stage.

Steve Bays, Hot Hot Heat/Mounties

Hot Hot Heat was playing Reading Festival in the UK for the third time, and after our set, Paul Nathan Phillips Square—it was the end of January, probably minus 30. There was a bunch of snow that was piling up on the tent roof, over the stage, and a huge pile of it just dropped on the turntable. It ruined not just the song, but the turntable. I kept rapping with no beat. I forget what song it was, but I had to break into a super long a capella. It became a spoken word show.

I remember another festival I played in Kelowna called Keloha. It was a beautiful day, but the heat was warping the records. Fortunately, Max Kerman from the Arkells was there side-stage, just hanging out. He came up and grabbed a guitar, and I think we did a cover of "Ms. Jackson" by Outkast. He bailed us out that time.

Is anyone listening? Photo via Flickr user wonker

MSTRKRFT's Jesse Keeler and Al-P

Al-P: I can't recall what the festival was, but it was in London England at Hyde Park. We're playing during the day, and because there are lot of rich houses around there, they had a noise limitation in effect. They were running the sound system super quiet; it was embarrassingly quiet. We're used to being in loud nightclubs and our ears are not as sensitive as others, but when you see the crowd is unhappy about the volume, you know it's pretty low.

So we're like, 'What the fuck are we going to do?' What we ended up doing was that we would slowly bring down the master output on our mixer, so the front of house engineer would slowly bring it up on his end—he had a meter that he was following to keep it at a certain level. We'd bring it down leading up to a break, and when the kick drum would come back in I'd go back up to the full level, and the sound system would erupt. The crowd would go crazy! Then the engineer would panic to bring it down again. We got away with doing this two or three times, but on the fourth time we got in trouble for it.

Jesse Keeler: The crowd figured out that it was the sound guy, not us, and they're yelling. Every time the music went down the crowd would boo. At one point, he's on the side of the stage and we made frowny faces and pointed at him. The whole crowd got angry and was throwing bottles and cans at him. He was an older guy and he started to cry. I felt bad for him. He was, like, "I'm so sorry...I love music!" That's a nightmare, to put him in a bad situation with an angry crowd. But you should probably figure out your noise clearances before you have a festival in the middle of a park.

Katie Monks, Dilly Dally

We were playing some whatever festival in the States this summer. I mean, it was like chill, fun, free festival. I was all excited to go drinking with the girl from Bully ; we were going to go hang. I went to the van to go grab my backpack after I had played my set. The van was tilted on this big slant and I slammed the sliding door on my two fingers, which I use to play guitar and also have sex with people. I just totally crushed/annihilated my fingers and the band wasn't around.

I was just lying down on the ground screaming really loud. "Nooooo!" My fingers were not supposed to go that way. I pulled back open the door and was screaming. I was by myself and just laid down on the ground, super dramatic and totally intoxicated. I finally heard Liz , like, "What?" I was like, "I need you, Dilly Dally!" She was pissed off, like, "chill out man." I came out crying from behind the van, "They went in ways they weren't supposed to go," and held up my two sexy fingers.

Liz was like, "Yo girl, I know in the back tent there's this huge bin full of ice, come with me.' I went to the back room and there's this big bin of ice and some annoying people. She said, "keep them in there, it'll help the swelling. I'm going to find you a joint." She had to ask 20 different people at this festival in Cincinnati before she could find papers, which is quite telling of the festival as well.

She finally found some papers, rolled up a big old doobie, and got me ripped.

The place we stayed that night, this lady made this amazing potion out of wax and herbal oils to help my fingers completely heal. Now everything's OK.

Follow Gregory Adams on Twitter.

In the 80s, Graham Nash from Crosby Stills & Nash appeared on MTV for an interview. The popular band had refused to make music videos, and Nash said the reason why was that he didn't want to provide the images that people would see when they hear his music. Instead, he said that they should instead create their own internal and unique mental visuals to accompany the track. Today, as a consequence of our constant bombardment with screen-based media, some experts believe that kids may have a harder time doing that.

A new book out on August 9 called Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction Is Hijacking Our Kids by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, one of the country's top addiction experts, details how compulsive technology usage and reliance on screens can neurologically damage the developing brain of a child the same way that drug addiction can. Through extensive research, clinical trials with diagnosed screen addicts, and experience treating a variety of other types of addicts, the author explores the alarming reality of how children could be "stunting their own creative abilities" by constantly turning on and tuning in.

Dr. Kardaras, who grew up playing Asteroids and loved Ms. PacMan, discusses how game developers use tests to measure dopamine and adrenaline levels in order to make video games as addicting as possible. He also explains how technology might stagnate frontal cortex development. With Glow Kids, Kardaras seeks to push the thesis that we should let children's "brains fully develop first before we expose them to these digital drugs." VICE chatted with the author to learn more about his research, why kids are both boring and bored today, and why social media is an illusion of real connection.

VICE: In the beginning of your book, you quote the song that the Oompa-Loompas sing in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory featuring the lyrics, "It rots the senses dead/It kills the imagination dead." How relevant is this to what is going on today with kids and screens?
Dr. Nicholas Kardaras: I think that Ronald Dahl lyric is extremely relevant and prescient. I've worked clinically with over 1,000 teens over the past decade plus and one of the most amazing things that I observed was that kids raised from an early age on a high-tech/high-screen diet suffered from what seemed to be a digital malaise. They were, almost universally, what I like to call "uninterested and uninteresting." Bored and boring, they lacked a natural curiosity and a sense of wonder and imagination that non-screen kids seemed to have. They didn't know—or care to know—about what was happening around them in the world. All that seemed to drive them was a perpetual need to be stimulated and entertained by their digital devices.

Kids' brains develop during key developmental windows when they engage their active imagination in such things as creative play. These windows are when the body builds the most neuronal connections. Kids who are just passively stimulated by a glowing screen don't have to do the neural heavy lifting to create those images. The images are provided for them, thus stunting their own creative abilities.

I grew up in the 1970s and started playing Atari around middle school. I was enthralled with the video games, but still remained active. What's the difference between how young people engaged with gaming back then compared to today?
The real key difference with that generation of video games and today's generation of video games is a qualitative one. Games today are more immersive, interactive, and realistic. And that's just the two-dimensional games. Don't get me started on immersive 3D and augmented reality holographic games. As my friend Dr. Andrew Doan, the Head of Addiction Research for the Pentagon and US Navy who has extensively researched video games, likes to say, today's games are a multi-billion dollar industry that employ the best neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists to make them as addicting as possible.

The developers strap beta-testing teens with galvanic skin responses, EKG, and blood pressure gauges. If the game doesn't spike their blood pressure to 180 over 140, they go back and tweak the game to make it have more of an adrenaline-rush effect. The problem is that adrenaline rush affects what's called the H-P-A Axis (Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal Axis) and creates the fight-or-flight adrenal response. But that fight-or-flight response in nature is a fairly brief event—you get chased by a dog, your heart races, and your adrenaline surges, but then you calm down when the threat is gone.

With video games, however, the kid sits and plays for hours of adrenal-elevated fight-or-flight. This is not a good thing. Research has shown that this latest generation of games significantly raises dopamine levels, the key neurotransmitter associated with our pleasure/reward pathways and the key neurotransmitter in addiction dynamics. One study showed that video games raise dopamine to the same degree that sex does, and almost as much as cocaine does. So this combo of adrenaline and dopamine are a potent one-two punch with regards to addiction.

I've worked with hundreds of heroin addicts and crystal meth addicts, and what I can say is that it's easier to treat a heroin addict than a true screen addict—Dr. Nicholas Kardaras

A friend of mine has two kids, and he takes them everywhere with him, but both kids are always engaged with their tablet and have headphones on. The only time we hear from them is when their battery runs out. What are some long-term effects of this type of behavior?
What you have observed is exactly what I just talked about: Kids who are so habituated to their hyper-stimulating and dopamine-activating immersive screen reality that they choose to stay in the digital Matrix. The reason why this effect is more powerful on children than adults—although we all know of many adults who are screen-addicted—is that children still don't have a fully-developed frontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls executive functioning, decision making, and impulse control.

Neuropsychologists call the frontal cortex a person's "brakes," but that part of the brain doesn't develop until our early 20s, which is why teens engage in all sorts of risky behavior—from bungee jumping to unprotected sex. They don't have the impulse control and "consequential thinking" parts of their brains developed. Adding to the problem, research shows that both drug use and excessive screen usage actually stunts the frontal cortex and reduces the grey matter in that part of the brain. So hyper-arousing games create a double whammy. Not only are they addicting, but then addiction perpetuates itself by negatively impacting the part of the brain that can help with impulsivity and good decision making.

Can a screen addiction even compare to a heroin or cocaine addiction? Most people would say no, especially since phones are a necessity in today's world.
Well, I definitely think that screen addiction meets all diagnostic clinical criteria for addiction. As does the Chinese Health Organization and many other countries throughout the world. The US is a bit late to the dance. We don't have it as an "official" diagnosis in our DSM, but we do have the topic marked as requiring further study and review. While phones may be a necessity—and I say may because, let's face, we can live without a phone—they're definitely not a necessity for an eight, nine, or ten-year-old.

My whole thesis is that we should let the child's brain fully develop first before we expose them to these digital drugs (which they definitely are). I've worked with hundreds of heroin addicts and crystal meth addicts, and what I can say is that it's easier to treat a heroin addict than a true screen addict, precisely because they're so ubiquitous in our society that people inevitably have to interact with them on some level. Not so with heroin. In my clinical experience, the key to digital addiction prevention is to be mindful of the potential dangers of screen addiction and limit usage during those key developmental ages before it creeps over into digital addiction, because that's a real bitch to treat.

How does screen tech affect behavioral disorders like ADHD, anxiety, depression, increased aggression, and psychosis?
Dr. Dimitri Christakis' research has found that screen exposure increases the probability of getting ADHD, and several peer-reviewed studies have linked internet usage to increased anxiety and depression. I think some of the most shocking research is that which shows how kids can get psychotic-like symptoms from gaming, wherein the game blurs reality for the player. It's known as "Game Transfer Phenomenon" and has been extensively studied by Dr. Mark Griffith and Dr. Angelica de Gortari in England. Gamers hear and see elements of the game long after they've stopped playing; Minecraft players start seeing the real world in the cube-forms of the game. I've worked with several teens who've had apparent psychotic breaks from their excessive gaming, and two who needed to be psychiatrically hospitalized. It's scary stuff. We know that children develop their sense of what's real and what isn't—what psychologists call "reality testing"—between the ages of three and ten. If they are exposed to reality-blurring imagery during that key developmental stage, it compromises their ability to discern reality. That's less likely to happen to an adult gamer, but it's occurred.

Even though we are seemingly more connected than ever with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, it seems there's a big disconnect in the way people communicate in person because of all the texting and social media. How does the screens play into that?
I like to call social media the illusion of connection. Author Johan Hari calls it a "parody" of genuine connection. We are social animals hardwired for social connection, but that seems to require genuine, in-depth, face-to-face intimacy and connection—not Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

Research has shown that the more Facebook friends one has, the higher the likelihood of depression. That's been attributed to the "comparison effect": I get more and more down about my life the more and more idealized images I keep seeing of peoples projected happy lives . Let's face it, most people don't post Facebook pics of when they're struggling. Instead, it's just, look at how wonderful my vacation is! types of photos. You see enough of those and you can begin to feel pretty crappy, if that's your only social connection.

'Glow Kids' is out August 9 on St. Martin's Press. Pre-order it here.

Follow Seth on Twitter.

Photos by Henry Langston

This article originally appeared on VICE UK

It's been five years, and the question still remains of how we make sense of the English riots of 2011. Riots that saw more than 14,000 people take to the streets across England for three days. Events that saw buildings destroyed, neighborhoods wrecked, shops looted, and five lives lost. There can be no doubt that it was a social event of some magnitude—but quite what it meant and represented is still open to debate.

For the government and tabloid media, it was, from the beginning, all about gangs and "mindless criminality." And even when it became clear that gangs didn't cause the riots, and that, arguably, a more sophisticated understanding was needed to explain the worst outbreak of disorder the UK had witnessed in the post-World War era, gang suppression was still trotted out as the dominant government response to riots not caused by gangs. So much for evidence-based policy.

For the left, the riots were interpreted in two different ways. Offering a liberal left perspective we have the Guardian and LSE's Reading the Riots research, based on interviews conducted with rioters after the riots had happened. This research confirmed much that was self-evident: the rioters came predominantly from disadvantaged communities, they were angry at the way things were, and many had experienced a hostile relationship with the police, particularly over the disproportionate use of stop and search. In the wake of the shooting of Mark Duggan—the flashpoint that ignited the riot—this anger exploded into days of rage.

Where once the more critical left had considered rioting the "ballot box of the poor," a different interpretation was offered in this case. These weren't political riots, but simply exercises in violent shopping perpetrated by what Zygmunt Bauman termed "defective consumers"—people who had nowhere left to express their anger at the way things were, but at the shops, which they then looted. For academics Simon Winlow and Steve Hall, the riots simply expressed the situation of the urban poor in a post-political present. Vaguely pissed off about their situation but lacking any capacity to articulate their opposition to the system that marginalized them, in rioting they blindly acted out their discontent.

Here I want to offer a different interpretation; one that considers the riots less from the perspective of what people said about them after they happened, but attends more closely to the acts the rioters actually engaged in. By looking more closely at what people did as opposed to what they retrospectively said they were doing, a different interpretation of the riots emerges.

Much has been made of the looting—and there was lots of it—but there were other things going on, too. The forces of law and order were attacked rather than respected. In places like Hackney and Tottenham, rioters and the police waged pitched battles. Instead of behaving, the rioters actively misbehaved, running, shouting, behaving in ways that violated the behavior expected of law-abiding citizens. Instead of respecting capitalist property rights, they violated them. Ealing, a prosperous area in London, was literally wrecked. In Croydon, shops were torched. In Nottingham, police stations were burnt down. Shopping malls across the country were attacked and looted. And all of this we saw played on a loop on 24-hour news channels.

While it's easy to dismiss these acts as "mindless criminality," or, from the perspective of the critical left, as exercises in "defective consumption" on the part of rioters whose minds have been colonized by the logic of capitalism, I've got a different interpretation. If we consider what the rioters were doing, consciously or unconsciously, then it seems to me that they were systematically violating the dominant principle around which law-abiding societies such as the UK are established. This principle holds that within those societies, people normally obey the rules.

What is interesting about the English riots is the way this principle was spectacularly dismantled through the violation, desecration, and inversion of normal codes of conduct. In a nutshell, in the performance of riot we bore witness to a carnival of disorder in which everything the ruling regime presumed as the basis for its rule was violently desecrated. These riots turned the world upside down.

This, I suggest, explains why the forces of law and order were attacked as opposed to being respected—as if to say: "We contest the monopoly of violence the police claim." Which helps make sense of the eccentric behavior that characterized the riot, and also explains the desecration of property, essentially saying, "Fuck your property rights." And in a society where the shopping mall has become our contemporary temple, "watch us steal your gaudy commodities" for good measure, too.

That takes me to my response to those who hold that these were "year zero" riots devoid of politics. That is nonsense. When over 14,000 people collectively dismantle the grounding principles of law-abiding society, through a range of interconnected performative practices, we're looking at a political event of some magnitude—and this holds independently of what individual rioters thought they were doing after the event.

The riots have to be interpreted in relation to the wider wave of revulsion the ruling regime has provoked. In the wake of a financial crisis bequeathed to the UK by its feral overclass of financiers; in the shadow of a political crisis perpetrated by its political establishment. The Occupy movement in many respects represented a middle-class backlash to a ruling regime that had lost any mandate to legitimacy. The 2011 riots represent another adaptive response. In this case, on the part of what Guy Standing calls the "new precariat": the powerless and marginalized.

Professor Simon Hallsworth is Pro-Vice Chancellor of Arts at the University of Suffolk, and an academic expert on urban violence.

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Which London Landmark Is Best to Occupy in a Protest?

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK

By 8 AM on Friday, it had begun. Protesters from Black Lives Matter UK started to block the road leading to Heathrow airport, laying themselves across the tarmac on the M4 at the start of what became a full day of "shutdown" actions around England. "We wouldn't be here shutting down roads, shutting down transport systems, if the system worked," said protester Shanice Octavia, speaking to VICE on Friday afternoon. "It's a cry to be heard."

By the evening, the focus had shifted towards rallies held in London, Nottingham, and Manchester where protesters socialized and strategized, banners at the ready. Photographer Chris Bethell headed to east London's Altab Ali park—a location named in memory of a Bangladeshi garment worker killed by three teens in a racist attack in 1978—to check things out.

Given how recent protest movements have failed to inspire the government to reverse unpopular decisions—first on UK military intervention in the Iraq War and then on the introduction of university tuition fees—Chris asked some of those gathered whether they think disruptive protest can work in the UK today.

Vivien

I think it depends on your definition of disruption, first and foremost. And if people don't listen, then you speak the language that they listen to. So whatever protest creates an answer, that's a protest that works. I think it's more than worth it if anybody feels disturbed. If somebody dies at the hands of racism, someone's one-hour delay is pretty insignificant.

The whole idea is to make noise and to represent that we won't stand for this treatment. It's not just about the person who is an hour late in getting home, it's about us standing up and saying that we refuse for these things to happen. It's a demonstration of the way we feel. It's not just a disruption.

Bethany, Antony, and Sahnah

Sahnah: To a point.

Bethany: Yeah, to some degree.

Antony: It gets the message out, doesn't it? But then it's also about the people you bring into that protest. Because it's not just about shutting stuff down—it's about changing perceptions of who has the power.

Bethany: It's not like they're being violent towards one another either. It's just us trying to get our voice heard. No one will listen otherwise; unfortunately that's how it is.

Antony: It's like how the slogan goes: "If they don't give us justice, then we won't give them peace."

Kit

Yes—people have to pay attention. If you're getting in their way then they have to. People have to be brought to a halt in the middle of everyday life to take notice.

Egg

I'm a miscarriage of justice—I spent a long time in prison because of police corruption. I'm one of two cases, where I spent eight years in prison and I haven't been told why. I think this is the only way; we haven't got any other way of making our voice heard but to create road blocks. They're peaceful—we're not about aggression. We're about change for the society we're living in. Unfortunately the people at the top do not give a shit about the people at the bottom. So if the people at the bottom don't have anything to eat, then they're going to eat the people at the top.

Sorana

It works everywhere—not only in the UK—and there's a reason it's called disruptive. It's meant to disrupt your daily life, to bring attention to an injustice. To get voices heard and bring about change.

Carson

I think what happened today was quite interesting. Those that were calling it disruptive were the ones held up in traffic, on their way to work, or to travel. I don't speak for Black Lives Matter, I only speak for myself, and my personal opinion is that what we did today was basically to shut it down. But is that a form of disruption or is it a form of raising awareness? A way to highlight deaths in custody, inequality in housing, lack of social services.

So when you tell people what is actually happening—and you are truthful with them—is this disruption? Because no one can say we are lying. Is learning the truth considered disruption? I don't think it is.

Ola

Completely. I think that we have to shut things down. We have to disrupt, to make things abnormal. I think it's a way of making ourselves heard and drawing attention to the movement. Unfortunately we have to mess things up. We have to make ourselves known. The way that we can do that is by disrupting the system.

Here are some more photos from the evening, where the peaceful rally continued, with people breaking off into groups based on their respective London neighborhoods to talk about future plans. A splinter group split off from the main rally to blockade the Aldgate East junction in east London. That direct action wasn't connected to the main congregation.

Follow Chris on Twitter

Photo via Flickr user iPhone Digital

Last last month, two state senators in New York—Jeffrey Klein and Diane Savino—issued a report laying out an apparently scary set of numbers. In New York City, Pokémon from Pokémon Go were spotted in front of the homes of 57 people on the state sex registry. Fifty-nine Poké gyms or Pokéstops and 73 other Pokémon items were within a half-block of a registrant's residence.

To be clear, there have been no reports of Pokémon-related sex crimes. The senators' document does cite the case of a man on Indiana's sex registry who was found playing Pokémon Go near where a 16-year-old boy also was playing. In another case in Arizona, the game developers put a Pokéstop at a historic hotel that has since been turned into a halfway house for 43 men on the state registry.

That was convincing enough for New York governor Andrew Cuomo to issue an order banning sex offenders on parole from playing Pokémon Go this week. On Wednesday, Klein, Savino, and additional senators introduced state bills that, among other things, would ban game developers from putting "in-game objectives" within a hundred feet of the home of a registrant.

Why target those with a sex crime on their record? A spokesperson for Klein's office told VICE this is because of the "very high" recidivism rates of sex offenders compared with other criminals, citing data from a report that Klein co-authored last year. That document notes a re-arrest rate of 48 percent within eight years for those on New York's sex registry, based on 2007 state data.

But that re-arrest rate includes charges for any crime—not just sex offenses, the target of the legislation. And it confirms a fact that recidivism researchers have long known: When sex offenders do commit another crime, it's far more likely to be a non-sexual one.

If anything, the data indicates that sex offenders' re-offense rates for other crimes are likely lower, not higher. A 2010 New York State report found that the state's offenders for all crimes had a three-year reconviction rate (a recidivism standard that should produce much lower numbers) of 42 percent.

More important, state figures show that people on the sex-offense registry have relatively low rates of reoffending for sex crimes. A 2007 state government report—the latest data available—cites a new sex crime re-arrest rate among registrants of 11 percent. And on the federal level, it's even lower: In perhaps the largest recidivism study, the US Department of Justice reported a three-year sex offender reconviction rate of 3.5 percent.

In a statement to VICE, Klein's office responded to this by saying: "We are being proactive in taking legislative steps to protect even one child enjoying this game from being hurt by a pedophile." (Governor Cuomo's office didn't respond to a request for comment, and Savino's office referred requests to Klein.)

For one thing, committing a sex-related crime does not necessarily make someone a pedophile. In recent years, people have been put on sex-offender registries for consensual sex, streaking, and public urination. But more notably, legislators' imperviousness to the data is part of the reason America's sex-offender laws have increasingly grown in number and complexity since the mid 90s.

In the run-up to passage of the 1996 Megan's Law, for example, Republican representative Jennifer Dunn asserted on the House floor that "the rate of recidivism for crimes is astronomical because these people are compulsive." In the Senate, Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchison asserted, "The repeat crime rate for sex offenders is estimated to be as much as ten times higher than the recidivism rate of other criminals."

And in a floor debate in 2005 over the Adam Walsh Act, Florida Republican representative Mark Foley (soon to resign for sending sexual messages to underage House pages) said, "There is a 90 percent likelihood of recidivism for sexual crimes against children. Ninety percent... that is their record."

None of those statements had any research basis. But those declarations and others have fueled the sex-crime policies that have come in since the mid 1990s—from sex registries to bans on offenders living near schools to laws prohibiting registrants from participating in Halloween. Since these restrictions were built on the faulty premise that sex offenders have high re-offense rates, it's unsurprising that they've done basically nothing to prevent new sex crimes.

For example, a meta-analysis of 20 years of research in the Journal of Crime and Justice noted that none of the six studies on registries conducted between 1995 and 2011 found that the registries lowered recidivism. Similarly, none of the eight studies between 2003 and 2012 of bans on where registrants can live found that they had any effect on sex crime rates or recidivism, according to a US Department of Justice summary.

And a 2009 study of the impact of Halloween Laws on sex crimes found no increased rate of sex crimes on Halloween. "These findings raise questions about the wisdom of diverting law enforcement resources to attend to a problem that does not appear to exist," the researchers drily noted.

If the same is said someday about a new Poké law, there will be a good reason: The vast majority of sex crimes are committed by first-time offenders. In a 2007 study, the Minnesota Department of Corrections reported that about 98 percent of its 10,600 sex crimes between 1990 and 2005 were by people never before convicted.

So while there's no evidence of Poké-predator problem, even if there were, a gaming law couldn't deter most new sex crimes.

One expert on sexual violence expert says bills like New York's make a classic mistake. "This is another bill based on the concept of 'stranger danger,' which the research shows comprises a very small portion of sex crimes against children," said Katie Gotch, an Oregon-based sexual behavior treatment provider who is a national co-chair of the National Partnership to End Interpersonal Violence, in an interview with VICE. "The majority of sexual abuse perpetrated against children is by someone the victim knows."

Follow Steven Yoder on Twitter.

JoEllen Notte

Last August, I sat in a conference room during Woodhull's Sexual Freedom Summit that was jam-packed with sex bloggers, educators, activists and sexuality professionals of all stripes. JoEllen Notte presented the results of her informal research on sex and depression, topics that, while talked about more frequently these days, are still heavily associated with shame. Talking about them in relation to one another is also relatively new territory.

Notte, also known as the "Redhead Bedhead," is a writer, blogger, and mental health advocate whose journey started after the dissolution of what she describes as a sexless marriage at age 32. She starting talking to people—interviewing them to learn as much as she could about their sex lives—and upon determining that others had issues with their sexuality too, she started writing.

At the start of this year's Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit—which goes through this coming Sunday—I spoke with Notte about her upcoming presentation and what she found when she spoke to 1,300 people about navigating sex, relationships, and depression.

VICE: When did your research about sex and depression begin?
JoEllen Notte: About two years ago. I'd written about the topic a couple of times, and the response was always overwhelming and covert. I'd get a ton of emails and private messages full of thanks, stories of experiences with depression, and relief to see it talked about publicly. But even while celebrating the fact that the topic was being discussed out in the open, they wouldn't post about it on Twitter or Facebook. That got me thinking about how many of us were having these experiences and feeling like it wasn't okay to talk about it publicly. I knew I wanted to write more about it, but I wanted to give other folks a chance to voice their experiences as well.

I started with a completely anonymous survey and gave folks an option to be interviewed. The survey was conducted in the fall of 2014 and the first round of interviews were in the spring of 2015. I wanted to make the interview process more accessible to folks dealing with depression, so I created a second interview that was conducted entirely online in the spring of 2016.

What sorts of questions did you ask?
The interview questions were about personal experience, relationships with partners, and relationships with healthcare professionals. If I had to sum up the results in one sentence it would be this: Depression is such a hard thing to face, and when we feel unheard, unsupported, and not believed by the people around us—especially those whose support we need the most—it can make facing it unnecessarily hard.

What did you learn from the first round of interviews?
The first round uncovered a flaw in the initial survey that makes me facepalm to this day! The first survey included a list of possible depression symptoms that included "decreased libido," but didn't give any option for the possibility that folks were having more sex when they were depressed—which turned out to be fairly common. I'd bought into the pervasive societal messaging that depressed people don't want sex and built that bias into the question. The second round of interviews allowed respondents to explain the impact of unmedicated depression on their sex lives in an essay question format, and over 25% reported an upswing in sexual activity. It was huge and made me more diligent about leaving room for people's stories.

While I'm glad we did the survey and I have the numbers I do, it's important to remember that it's an informal survey, not scientific research. I didn't set out to prove or disprove anything; I set out to help people feel heard. The survey accomplished that in its own way. When we go to conferences, people are thrilled to hear those numbers. For folks who have had their own experiences discounted, it's incredibly validating to see numbers that show those experiences are real and that they're not alone. People's stories matter, and they're yearning to talk about this.

Are there any specific insights you'd like to share?
I observed how couples navigated depression together. For example, couples where both parties had experience with mental illness tended to be better equipped to handle it. I also found some common refrains when it came to what is and isn't helpful. No one likes it when their partner tries to "fix" them.

Did you have any notable outlier responses to the interviews?
The project deals a lot with sexual function being hindered by medication's side effects, and I had a small contingent who were all taking the one antidepressant that is known for not negatively impacting sexual function and, in some cases, raising libido. After a while, I thought of stuff in terms of "unless you're on that drug."

Which drug?
It's my policy to not name drugs, as people have an unfortunate tendency to read a drug name on the internet and try to make medical decisions based on the fact that if a shiny website said it, it must be right for them. Apart from that, while that particular drug has a lower likelihood of sexual side effects, it is regarded as a not-very-effective antidepressant—this is coming from my research consultant, Stephen Biggs.

These people's experiences aren't "exceptional," necessarily, but in context of a project that is talking largely about lowered libido, anorgasmia, erectile dysfunction, decreased lubrication etc, coming across the people who were reporting no change in sexual function or increased desire stood out.

Can you give me an example of what you'll be presenting at Woodhull, or some advice you'd give readers based on what you've learned?
I'm on a mission to dismantle the adversarial approach to depression in loved ones that society has accepted as right for so long. Many of our respondents talked about resentment and tension between partners when one was dealing with depression and the other didn't understand it. I have written, and the interviews have confirmed, that when one partner is dealing with depression, one of the best things a couple can do is get on the same page, become a team. Otherwise the dynamic becomes "healthy partner" vs. "depressed partner and their depression," which is frustrating, counter-productive and, frankly, kind of mean. No one wants depression as their teammate! At Woodhull, we'll be talking about tools and strategies for making sure partners are on the same team, speaking the same language, and both getting the support they need.

It's such an important issue; sex and depression are taboo topics on their own and become even more so when you put them and relationships all together. It's hard to know how to work with that in a healthy way, we don't really have examples for what that looks like.
Yes! Two years ago I went hunting for resources for a partner and was kind of appalled by how much of what was out there treated depressed partners as threats to be managed.

Are you hoping that your research is going to change the medical understanding of sex and depression?
My intention with this project was to give people a voice and help them feel less alone in this experience. I never really expected it to go the direction it has, with all the research; that's been a pleasant surprise. It all started because people felt they weren't being believed, particularly by the medical community, so I suppose the fantasy would be for someone with the resources to get curious about how to help and actually do something about it.

What is your ultimate goal with this? What do you need to accomplish that goal?
My ultimate goal is to write a book. As for what I need, the answer to that is a bit of a personal one: I need to be healthy. This is a bit of a passion project, as I have over a decade of experience with depression and its accompanying physical and emotional symptoms. I'm working with my doctors, taking it one day at a time, and trying to remember to treat myself like I advise others to treat their depressed partners. Ultimately, though, my goal is to use this work to create a book that people dealing with depression can find validation in and that partners can use to help navigate depression together, as a team. When depression enters a relationship, it can feel like things are happening that neither partner understands. I want to help folks figure it out together.

Follow Caitlin Murphy on Twitter

For more of Brian Blomerth's work, visit his website, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Film stills courtesy of The Ink Connection

In the late 1970s, the BBC commissioned a TV series called Seven Artists (7 Parts) in which various creators speak about the production of a single art object. The final episode features iconic pop artist Edward Ruscha retrieving a damaged cardboard and papier-mâché "rock" from the Mojave desert in California. Ruscha then uses it to create a mold for a fiberglass replacement that he subsequently deposits back in the desert.

The replacement rock is known as "Rocky II."

That might sound like just another weird piece of art history, but when Pierre Bismuth—a Brussels-based artist known for reinterpreting artifacts and for helping write Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind—watched the film, his instinct was to ask: Where is 'Rocky II'?

He eventually posited that question to Ruscha at the press launch for a retrospective of the American's work in London's Heyward Gallery in 2009. When Ruscha refused to answer, Bismuth, perhaps inspired by the American artist's infatuation with the contradictory and the illogical, decided to hire a private detective to explore the matter without telling him the gig would be part of a larger art project. He also asked screenwriters to pen a film based on the private eye's findings. Then, Bismuth began making a quasi-documentary about the hired screenwriters making a movie about the hired private detective who's been tasked to find this possibly-nonexistent art object.

The weird and wonderful results, which blur the boundaries between what the real and unreal, are on offer in Bismuth's debut directorial effortWhere is Rocky II? premiering in Europe on August 9 at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. We got in touch with the director to discuss his strange exploration of an even stranger artwork.

It's a Wednesday morning in July and I'm watching a relatively unknown woman get ready for a photoshoot at her flat in northeast London. There's no backdrop, no team for hair and makeup, and aside from a camera, no additional equipment or assistants. There isn't an actual client or publication commissioning the photos, either.

"You should wear that lipstick you posted yourself wearing yesterday," says the photographer who has come to shoot 22-year-old Emma Breschi.

"Oh, the Kylie Lip Kit one?" Emma asks. "It's so hard to put on, but OK."

Emma is a self-proclaimed Instagram model – not to be confused with a model on Instagram, the Gigi Hadids and Kendall Jenners who use the app to promote their traditional modelling careers. Emma says she uses the platform as a vehicle for career advancement, creative expression and a way to earn money. How all that works, and to what end, is where the murkiness of Instagram modelling really comes into focus.

By her own telling, Emma doesn't fit into the typical body norms of either conventional or plus-size modelling. She has a commercial agent, but uses social media to hoist herself into the view of bookers who wouldn't normally work with someone of her body type. She posts the sort of hashtag-heavy, "body-confident" captions – "Note to 13 year old self: Emmerz, it's just a bikini. SO YOU BETTER WERQ IT HUNTY" – that earn her admiration from followers as well as offers for work and free clothes from brands who want to piggyback off that message.

"If someone offered you a lot of money to take a picture of something, would you do it?" Emma asks me. "It depends on the brand, but I'd do it if that brand ties into what I believe. I don't need money to buy expensive things, just money to live off. If I can get a couple of jobs in a month, that's my rent sorted."

Today she's on a "test shoot" job with Simone Steenberg, a Danish fashion and portrait photographer she met DM'ing on Instagram. Neither of them will be paid for their time, but when they post the pictures from the day they'll tag each other, opting to maximise their nebulous "influence" rather than make actual cash.

If Emma's only work came from unpaid test shoots like this one, she wouldn't be able to earn an actual living. But it doesn't. She also takes photos for brands like House of Sunny, NOE Garments and Ukulele Fashion – some of whom she models for.

In a good month she says she can earn up to a couple thousand pounds from both her photography and modelling. It's not consistent enough yet, though, so she also works in a pub around the corner from her flat; the owner recognised her from what he called her "well risky" photos.

Really, though, Emma says she didn't plan to model. "All the people that I tend to follow are amazing women not giving a shit about anyone's opinion, and when I saw that I was like, 'Maybe I should try out that stuff,'" Emma says. "I never set out to be a model. I think of myself as an image-maker, and what I do in front of the camera helps me be better behind it as well."

There's a lot of this rather vague "creative speak" when Emma talks about her job, something that surprised me when I first entered this world. I'd assumed that the women who call themselves Instagram models might be seeking and using male attention as a route to fame, but that didn't bear out. Instead, it seems that they use the platform primarily as a means to an end.

Speaking to 19-year-old Daisy, or @PinkandTonic, feels similar. Daisy, a student at Oxford University, knows she doesn't have the body type to be a conventional model, but sees modelling as a sort of stepping stone to other creative work – making clothes, or maybe styling. "If I already have this massive platform of people established, then anything I want to do, I already have a huge group of people I can market that to."

"I have no interest in guys commenting on my photo," she continues. "It's not about them being a guy, it's about the kind of comments they leave. Comments from girls are like, 'OMG this is gorgeous, I love these clothes, You look amazing'; comments from guys most of the time are a side smirk emoji and a flame. It's so different."

It may be different, but the main trope in photographing Instagram models still appears to revolve around guys looking at women, while photographing them. That concept stretches back to the late 2000s, and the boyfriends of fashion bloggers charged with photographing their girlfriends in their various outfits – see Rumi Neely, Aimee Song and Chiara Ferragni.

One of Simone Steenberg's photos from the "test shoot"

Today, an "Instagram model" is perceived as a pouting woman in her twenties who relies on well-established, largely male photographers to boost her profile. In some cases, that can all fall apart: Bleeblu, a popular photographer based in the US, was accused of coercing a teenage model into nude photoshoots in public places last year on Tumblr (allegations he has publicly denied). "I was an insecure and naive 19-year-old fangirl," the model wrote, "and he was a 27-year-old experienced and popular photographer. This dynamic made me easy to persuade despite my apprehension."

"I do think some they're gonna get a big following back in return. But the industry is so small, things get around."

By Insta-fame standards, both Emma and Daisy's followings are modest, at 4,400 and 2,400 respectively. To hear from someone with bigger numbers, I got in touch with Charlie Barker, a 20-year-old model from Nottingham with more than 600,000 followers. She was scouted on Instagram and signed by modelling agency Select in 2014.

Instead of sliding into Barker's DMs, I contacted her through her agent – a sign of how her career has graduated from the ranks of Instagram's informal accessibility. Still, she says over email that it's possible at this point for models to make a living based on Instagram alone, but that they'd probably have to be willing to hawk any old product that comes along – "a lot of promoting detox teas" – rather than opting for a more discerning approach. However, if and when representation from a major agency does come along, as it did for Charlie, an existing fan base means an Instagram model's creative and actual bargaining power could be superior to that of a regular model.

"When I first got signed my modelling and Instagram were very separate," she says. "Although I see them as segregated I think clients see the creativity I endorse within my page and want something more than 'just a model'."

Even if they don't get to a Charlie Barker level of followers, talking to Daisy and Emma you get the impression that fame isn't necessarily the goal. This isn't thirst-trap Instagram, with bums angled at phone cameras in selfies to ultimately lead to some free tickets to Lovebox. It's more like shrewd career planning that builds on and relies on other people's "likes". Daisy enjoys modelling "like I enjoy shopping – that doesn't mean it's all I want to do with my life".

"Instagram has become such a big part of – I don't want to say life, but maybe I should – what I'm trying to achieve," Emma says. "But I'm not just a model."

@rojospinks / @jake_photo

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Thumbnail image via Flickr user DonkeyHotey

I graduated from college in 2011, right in the middle of the recession. I also went to graduate school at great financial cost, which is something I will have to reckon with for the rest of my adult life. While I believe that higher education is valuable, I also did not pursue a PhD because it seemed like a fool's errand. Adjuncts live in poverty in hopes of getting a tenured position that is almost impossible to obtain, and the Science Wars of the 90s, which culminated in a physicist trolling a post-modern academic journal by publishing a fake paper, strongly influenced my decision to stop at a Master's.

Meanwhile, Charles Sykes, an author and senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, has spent most of his life railing against the academy and has written multiple books about how college degrees have become increasingly worthless. It's not hard to see his point when graduates are saddled with student loan debt and many people with Bachelor's are taking barista gigs or moving back in with their parents. I spoke with him about his latest work, Fail U (out August 9 on St. Martin's Press), which explores many of the issues facing students and universities today, including the education bubble, as well as if going to college is worth it at all. As Sykes describes the text, it's an "I told you so book," since a lot of the criticisms he laid out in his first book on higher education published in 1988 have not only gained mainstream acceptance, but the issues have actually gotten worse.

I spoke to the author about why fewer people should be pursuing four-year degrees, the fallacy of college for all, and how all of his fears about the state of higher education have come to fruition in the latest stage of America's culture wars.

VICE: Your book delves into the education bubble, the concept of microaggressions, and the so-called "kangaroo courts" that deal with allegations of on-campus rape. Is there a thesis that ties it all together?
Charles Sykes: Yeah, basically it's that college costs too much, takes too long, and offers dubious value to too many students. That would be the short version. Higher education has been able to get away with this stuff because people were willing to pay anything. And I think at a certain point––like when you've got $1.3 trillion in student loan debt––people are starting to ask, "What am I getting for these dollars? What's going on there?"

You've been writing about the same topic for decades. How has your thesis changed since you wrote your first book?
is a labor of love, because it's kind of an "I told you so" book. It's a revisiting of something that I wrote 28 years ago. The background is that my dad was kind of a maverick professor and a recovering journalist. And back then he wrote an article for a magazine that I was editing about professors who didn't teach that much, and the kind of bizarre, unreadable research that replaced actual teaching. It was kind of a funny article, but it was very punchy.

So we published it, and out of that article came my first book, ProfScam, which talked about the flight from teaching, the abandonment of undergraduates, and the fact that colleges had become too fat and bloated. And back then I thought, "People are gonna want to address this, people are gonna want to reform this, there's gonna be real change." And of course that was incredibly naive and nothing really changed. But it started an interesting debate, and this was my chance to look back 28 years later and say, "Why is every single thing I wrote about in that book worse ?"

You wrote your first book before the Sokal Affair happened, right? How validating was that, and do you feel like the scientific realists lost that battle of the culture wars given the proliferation of postmodern academic gibberish that comprises many people's dissertations?
You have no idea. When the Sokal thing took place, that academic fraud, it was one of those moments that every author has where they go, "I wish I could have included that in my book." It validated everything. It answered the question of, "What would happen if I wrote a paper of absolute gibberish? Would I be able to get the academy to take it seriously?" And we all know what happened.

It's an ongoing fight, although I do think that the Sokal scandal left a real mark. There's no question about it. But you do have these pockets in academia that can go on without being held accountable, because they can. It was a moment where you kind of turn on the spotlight and reveal what's going on, and it's actually kind of hilarious. No one ever gives up anything in academia because they all have tenure and they all have their own journals. As long as they get published, they're gonna continue to do it. But that was kind of a turning point.

Universities are willing to charge as much tuition as they're willing to get out of them, but undergraduate teaching is just not a priority, and hasn't been one for a very long time—Charles Sykes

In your book, you talk about how cash is becoming scarce at universities and that some of them are shuttering. How is that possible when tuition is now basically the cost of a house? And how do operational costs increase as the number of underpaid adjuncts soars?
Well that is the heart of the book. Students are being asked to pay more and more, and the quality is increasingly questionable. What was most eye-opening, even for me, is that more than 70 percent of people teaching in academia today are part-timers or part of this academic underclass. And I think it's because universities are just not that focused on students. They are willing to charge them as much tuition as they're willing to get out of them, but undergraduate teaching is just not a priority, and hasn't been one for a very long time.

I think that's why there is the moment where we might possibly be able to reform higher education. Because of exactly what you said––we have this massive bubble, and people are going, Wait, wait wait. I'm basically spending $50,000 a year on tuition and I wasn't getting many real professors in the classroom. What's that about? And it goes to this academic culture of hiring and promoting teachers not by the quality of their teaching, but by research, some of which is quality and some of which is just junk.

How did we get to the point that an emphasis on teaching is considered professional suicide?
What happens in higher education is that the lower-tier schools want to raise their prestige by becoming the Harvard of North Dakota, and the way that we do that is by emphasizing the research as opposed to the teaching. So you have the kind of pressure that you used to have at the big research universities not being put on the professors at schools that used to pride themselves on teaching students.

So how do we reverse the course to get the emphasis back on students?
That's the big question. I thought that when I wrote my first book that there would be pushback by students demanding better quality education and that people would realize at some point that the pendulum has swung too far away. But nothing happened. How do you turn a battleship in a bathtub? When you think about how technology has changed every other industry––entertainment, the media, transportation––I want to know why we still have brick-and-mortar colleges that operate the way they did in the Middle Ages. Is it possible that students could use new technology to complete a college education in two years or three years as opposed to four years? What's sacred about four years? I think part of it is that students need to stand up for themselves, and parents are going to have to stop writing these giant checks, and trustees are going to have to say that these universities are going to have to start paying more attention to the education they actually provide, as opposed to just building more Taj Mahals.

Can you address some of the proposals from the left on how to deal with rising student debt, like the idea of debt-free college?
There's two really huge underlying problems here: The cost of education, and the value that students get for it. The problem is that the free tuition doesn't fix anything. If history is any guide, bailouts make problems worse. Higher education is so expensive because they get the free money that gives them an excuse not to fix anything. So ideas like free tuition would shift costs to the taxpayers, many of whom don't have college educations. And I think, quite frankly, it will make higher education more expensive. Because the track record is that the more free money they have, the more they spend. But in terms of debt reduction, I think we should explore refinancing student debt and making it easier to repay. The free tuition idea, though, I think would backfire badly. It would pump a whole bunch of students into college who don't need to be there or belong there. And it would take off the hook because we're picking up the tab.

This whole idea of "college for all" is basically a hoax... and I think many students have been conned.

Should fewer people be going to college, and is the root of the problem an inability or unwillingness to accept that not everyone's kids should wade into academia?
Yeah. And politicians don't want to say this––although I will give Hillary Clinton credit for saying in her speech that not everybody needs to have a four-year college degree. She's absolutely right. This whole idea of "college for all" is basically a hoax. First of all, not everybody needs a college degree. Not everybody can do college work. There are a lot of people who would be extremely happy doing other things. We have too many students going to college. There are millions of students who have gone to college, who are not academically prepared for it, who have taken on debt, who have then dropped out with the debt load, and the wage premium for those students is absolutely zero. And I think those students have been conned.

I think I just missed the culture of microaggression by a couple of years, and I don't really understand it or where it came from. When did this phenomenon begin, and is this similar to the PC movement of the 90s in the sense that it will eventually recede?
It's a sort-of culmination of the idea that we need to bubble-wrap children. You go to a university because you want to expand your thinking. If you don't want to see or hear things that make you uncomfortable, you should go to a Trappist monastery or stay in your mom's basement. When you go to a university, you have to understand that you don't have a right to not be offended. You don't need to go into a safe room to watch a movie about puppies because someone is giving a speech that you disagree with. So I think this is one of those things because the university is a hermetically sealed bubble, we've multiplied administrators and created these programs––but I do think there's a backlash.

How does this digression about microagressions fit into your larger point? Do you think that because today's students go unchallenged, it makes their degrees more worthless?
I don't want to be misunderstood that the point of college is to get a good job. That's not my point. I actually believe in the humanities and developing the life of the mind. So the question is, at the very moment when people are questioning the value of a college education, what happens is that you have this outburst of sort-of ideological conformity, the searching out of microaggressions. It's sort of ironic that tolerance has taken on this new meaning. So that just reinforces the doubts about the wisdom and the value of what's passing for higher learning.

I'm not that old, and this wasn't a thing that people talked about when I went to college. Granted I went to school in Florida, but when did this take hold?
I don't know. That's an excellent question. Part of what's happened is that the kind of people attracted to higher education and to the administration tend to be people who have either bought into a touchy-feely approach to some of these issues, or people who are either just absolutely terrified that people will be offended. But one of the things that have catalyzed this, to be quite honest with you, is the way that the federal government has forced universities to make sure they're not hostile environments in any way. Once somebody says, "I feel unsafe," that triggers a whole host of federal laws and rules and regulations. I used to be able to say, "I think you're a Fascist and I disagree with you." That was the old political correctness. The new political correctness is saying, "I feel unsafe." And then all these bureaucracies question whether that's going to trigger some sort of federal discrimination action.

I understand the educational bubble part of your book, and you've just clarified your point about microagressions. But can you explain how the bits about the panic over sexual assault fits into your thesis? It seems like a weird jag that might undermine your other points.
OK, that's a fair question. But part of it is questioning what's happening on university campuses in terms of things like due process and the pressures on faculty members and the students. If you were gonna send your son or daughter to an institution and basically be driving a BMW off a cliff every year, what are you gonna expect? In a time that people are wondering, What exactly goes on there? and What am I getting for my money? this needs to be on the table. If you've gone through three or four years before being railroaded out this is a legitimate question and concern. Some of the people described in that chapter are liberal feminists who realize that there are some things that you cannot say or write about on a university campus without putting your career in jeopardy.

Can you talk about why you think schools have taken it upon themselves to handle cases of sexual assault, and how that sense of policing fits into your larger point about what the university has become?
Well that goes back to the same thing––the rules and regulations being mandated by the federal government. There was that "Dear Colleague" letter that went out from the Department of Education that basically said, "You are going to be held to a different standard of sexual assault. You don't have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt." This creates a really scary environment for students who ought to be treated fairly and reasonably. I also think that for a lot of undergraduates, what happened at the University of Virginia really reflects on what's going on in higher education today.

I would think that everybody would be better off if they had the criminal justice system as opposed to bureaucrats. One of the reasons I included that chapter was because of hearing so many stories of what you call the "kangaroo courts," which lack the concept of due process. Until you experience that, you don't have the appreciation of a criminal justice system where you actually have rights, and there's actual evidence. And so we've created these islands where your life can be destroyed. And that's the reason why I included it.

How is the concept of today's university ultimately different than the original conception of it?
Today's university gives lip service to educating students. I think this massive industrial-research complex that treats students like an afterthought has been building for some time. There was a time when the university was a place of the mind where you expected academic freedom, where if you graduated from that university you'd actually be an educated person. Those things aren't necessarily true anymore.

Fail U. is out August 9 on St. Martin's Press. Pre-order it here.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.